Composting as Artistic Practice

Gerardo Gomez TondaPortfolio 8/2020

Index

Composting as Artistic Practice

Origin Stories Workshop-performance and video installation, 45min. If Not Now, BAK basis voor aktuele kunst, Utrecht 2020. Composting with Worms Video documentation, 15min. HKU MAFA, 2020.

Composting with the Archive Workshop-performance, 13 sessions of variable durations in 9 months. Various locations in the Netherlands 2019—2020.

Antecedents

Aguila Devorando Serpiente Lecture -performance, 9min. HKU MAFA, 2019. Making Sense, UU, Utrecht 2020.

Cube Performance, 10min. HKU MAFA, Utrecht 2019.

Infiernillo1961/Winter,allegrononmolto Video, 3:32min. HKU MAFA, Utrecht 2018.

Bios

Composting as artistic practiceComposting is a practice of soil renewal. As artistic practice composting works and thinks through forms of belonging. It takes place in form of eco-social collaborations investigating relationship to land and multispecies encounter.

As a migrant in the Netherlands, I’m looking to open spaces and find opportunities to learn with the structures and everyday practices that articulate belonging, namely that which grounds, enables and facilitates rooting.

Composting as artistic practice asks:‘How can we imagine and build an inclusive form of belonging?’

So far three sub-projects have emerged: Origin Stories, Composting with Worms, and Composting with the Archive.

Origin StoriesOrigin Stories explores narratives and articulations of be-longing in a series of participative collaborative perfor-mances. They combine the stories of a flooded town, my family archive, a fish invasion, together with the exercise of composting waste. It is the concrete challenge of find-ing belonging in a particular physical space.

Workshop - performance at If Not Now, BAK 2020. Photo: Chun - Yao Lin

Some important elements of Origin Stories are participation, conversation and performing sim-ple exercises that trigger haptic relations like embroidery.

Storytelling,contextandbelonging.Departing from family archive, I have researched social-po-litical-ecological trajectories that reveal other sides to the stories that inform my sense of belonging. These intertwined narratives are the case study for the workshop-performance.

Futures with Belongings, Embroidery and conversation exercise. MAFA HKU Open day 2019. Inspired by the training from Patricia Kaersenhout, (New) For-

mats of Care in Times of Violence, BAK 2019.

As part of the workshop performance, we practice articulations of belonging via storytelling.OriginStories, workshop - performance and video installation. If Not Now, BAK 2020. Photo: Chun - Yao Lin

A long piece of fabric hangs from strings making a shelter for the participants. It provides the needed architecture for the workshop: to keep 1.5 mts of distance, a screen for a video-projection, and a setting for sharing stories.After listening to the stories of the video, with the knowledge we carry in our lives, we help the fishes in finding their belonging. The session closes with composting BAK’s waste, with making new soil.

One of the 50 fishes that I made togheter with my partner and two children for the workshop - performance at If Not Now, BAK 2020. Photo: Chun - Yao Lin View of the installationOriginStories, at. If Not Now, BAK 2020. Photo: Chun - Yao Lin

CompostingwithWorms,is a video documentation of the process of adopting worms that my partner, two kids and me did over the course of two weeks during the COVID 19 lockdown.

This 15min video was edited with close attention to the work of re-arranging ourselves in the constellation of belongings that is our family to accommodate the worms as new members. Facing the challenge of making space for other critters, pushing our sense of belonging be-yond, are in this case registered as subtle transformations and movements in the dimensions of emotional labor and haptic relations.

Composting with Worms

CompostingwithWorms, video documentation still. HKU MAFA, 2020

Above and below: CompostingwithWorms, video documentation still. HKU MAFA, 2020Wormpjes, drawing by Juna Gomez Tonda depicting a section of the worm bin we

made. Color pencils and copper tape on paper. The Hague, 2020

Patriarchyandhumansupremacy.The structures that organizethe cohabitation and sociality of my home are the site ofcontestation and work for this project. Facing patriarchy,with its hierarchical arrangements of subjects is one of thebiggest challenges of the project.

For the Layering session, some participants puzzle up specific relations with the scavenged archive pieces.

This project is comprised by a series of collaborative performance, in total 13 ses-sions of variable duration in across a period of 9 months in various locations in the Netherlands between 2019—2020.

Whatwouldittaketocompostmybe/longings?

This project is the fabulation of methods, processes and conditions I required to effectively compost a section of my groundings represented by my family archive.

Composting with the archive

Scavenging: Together with my partner, and my two kids, we went through prints of my family archive with scissors, breaking-down the images following the intuition of our hands. This took place in two sessions of 1.5hrs each.

Layering: With the help of 10 participants, we organized the broken-down pieces using our intuition, and placing them on a soil microbiology diagram based on Elaine Ingham’s diagram.

Sound scale: My kids and I, explored sonic expressions of microecological soundscapes. Later I arranged the samples in a sound piece. Link to the Sound Scale.

Scavenging session at home. The Hague 2019 Layering session, the participants piece the diagram together . HKU MAFA, Utrecht 2019

Mesophiles: MA students Fine Arts, Scenography , and tutors from both programs of the HKU, we enacted a soil dynamic to process further the pieces of the archive. The dynamic involved making groups of fungi, bacteria, and nematodes, that would engage together with the archive scraps, in-gesting them and transforming them into something new.

A bag: This pending session, will happen with the help of 6 to 8 volunteers that participated in the Mesophiles process, which will turn the previous session materials into a bag or a container or a carrier.

Mesophiles session at ShareYourPractice,HKU, Utrecht 2019. Wooden structure, fabric, vid-

eo projection, and archive prints scraps.

Mesophiles session at ShareYourPractice,HKU, Utrecht 2019. Some participants -that played the role of fungi, write down

their group sentences.

AntecedentProjects2018-2019

ObrasPT#202,fromTheArchive.35mm positive film. Michoacan Mexico, 1958

Workingwithbotharchivesandbe/longing.

Thearchives.My cultural archive growing up as middle-class white male in Mex-ico City; together with a physical archive, a collection of slides and 8mm films made by my grandfather, a Spanish exile from the Spanish Civil War who fled to Mexico, while working as engineer between the years 1955 and 1965 in Mexico.

Be-longing.In the last couple of years, I have been researching my archives with questions such as: ‘Is it possible to rearticulate be/longings?’, ‘How to let go of the lingering smell of remote soils, and root ourselves in the here and now instead?, ‘How to treat toxic sites of belonging?’

ThestoriesItelltotellmystorieswith.The archives are to me a material body and a method to work with, exploring accountability and difference, be/longing and its sociopolitical narrative articulations.

AguilaDevorandoSerpiente,2019

Cube,2019

Infiernillo1961/Winter,allegrononmolto,2018

A sonic, visual, haptic storytelling performance of 9min. Performed at HKU in 2019 and at MakingSense, UU, Utrecht 2020. This lecture-performance, is a decolonial reflection on the construction and interrela-tion of stories and myths that carrie a personal sense of belonging.

Aguila Devorando Serpiente

In both images, the audience engages with sonic, visual and haptic storytelling at the HKU performance in 2019.

Storytelling and Hapticallity. Complex interrelated stories, encounter the audience by weaving a performance haptically, with sounds, and vi-sually.

Decolonial storytelling. A story without conclusions, made from a rela-tional perpective, challenges the fundational myth of the begingin of the Mexican nation-state by highlighting its colonial discourse. Link to Aguila Devorando Serpiente at the UU, 2020

Three of the 29 slides projected in Aguila Devorando Serpiente using positive film slides of my archive, digital drawing and text. Upper left: the eagle is also a piece of removed rainforest. Lower left: an allegory to the

Mexican national emblem. Lower right: the Infiernillo Hydroelectric Dam the day of its inauguration.

Three projections: a fixed beamer, forward and backwards 8mm film, and a moving slide projection, filtered by my hand. HKU, Utrecht 2019

Performance involving three projectors with a duration of 10min at the HKU, Utrecht 2019. With the three projections (video, slides and film), bringing their specific temporalities and narratives of displacement, I draw a virtual space walled by the perspectives that inform my belonging in displacement.

Cube

Time and Temporalities coming together in the form of exile. With Cube, I explore ways in which the Mexican revolution, the Spanish civil war and the modernization of Mexico in-form the childhood of my grandparents, that of my par-ents, and my own. Three temporalities are made present by a forward and backwards 8mm projection, a video projection with sound and slide projector, are intersected with a slide projection, that is search for a binding position. This slide projection, is me pointing the projector, looking for a mo-ment to conceal the cube.

Link to Cube documentation of HKU 2019 performance.

Nine 35mm slides made by me as a child, one 8mm film reel made by my grandfather in 1964, and a video composition of footage of the Mexican

revolution and the Spanish civil war.

Still of the video projection of Cube [link here]. This footage shows Spanish exiles in 1939, walking the so called The Road of Death (La Carretera de la Muerte) close to the city of Malaga, Spain.

Video still from Infiernillo-1961, ICA, Mexico 1961.

With this video essay of 3.5Min, presented at the HKU in 2018, I attempt to question the (colonial) narrative devices used in the historic documen-tary/propaganda of the making of the biggest hydroelectric dam in Latin America at the time; a project where my grandfather took part in the making.

Infiernillo1961/Winter,allegrononmolto

Infiernillo1961/Winter,allegrononmolto,video with dissonant L and R channels. The left audio channel has the original soudtrack of the documentary, which contains Vivaldi’s piece, and the right audio channel a different version of the same music piece. On each still, Vivaldi’s sheet music on the left, the corresponding poem line on

top; on the right Infiernillo - 1961 footage, and english subtitles at the bottom.

Listening. How to listen to the sounds uttered from hegemonic discourses, the modernity/colonial speech on behalf of their interests and endeav-ors, in diametric contrast to the subaltern and the local, could this sonic encounter be dissonant? For this work, my attention is placed on the tension between the images, the text, and the music.

Infiernillo’sDamandVivaldi. Departing from the documentary made by ICA about the Infiernillo dam, where my grandfather collaborated as an engineer for its construction, I payed close attention to the decisions made by the filmmakers. I was then taken by the soundtrack which is composed by a selection of European clasic and romantic music. For this video, I focused on the fragment where the third movement of Winter by A. Vivaldi plays. How to listen to Vivaldi’s piece in such context?

Link to Infiernillo1961/Winter,allegrononmolto

Bios

Gerardo Gomez Tonda (b. 1981, Mexico City) is an artist who is based in The Hague, the Netherlands. He holds a BA in Visual Arts from the ENPEG La Esmeralda, Mexico City, Mexico (2009) and an MAFA from the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, the Netherlands (2020). Gomez Tonda is interested in the post-anthro-pocentric politics of relation, composting his family archive to unlock its nutrients and identify/filter toxicities, while facilitating participation through a relational process in which the self can become-with the audience. He is inspired by the power of stories, images and sound, especially the relationships, entanglements, kinships and nostalgia they embody, and the pathways they open up to imagine other ways of being (together). While explor-ing notions of accountability and difference, the artist utilizes his own position of displacement to understand complex and situated narratives of belonging, and to form propositions for more caring ways to live and die together. His work takes the form of performances, videos, workshops, drawings, and installations.

His solo exhibition Shadowland was presented at ‘t-Attelier, The Hague, the Netherlands (2017). Selected group shows include AnonymeZeichner, Galerie im Körnerpark, Berlin, Germany (2018); Sinóptica, Galería del centro Multimedia, CNCA, Mexico City (2005); Código Local, Centro Cultural Muros, Cuernavaca, Mexico (2007); New MexicanVideocreation, Contemporary Art Salon, Tenerife, Spain (2008); PalattiIstanbul, KunstVlaai Istanbul, Is-tanbul, Turkey (2010) and DearAmsterdam,GreetingsfromIstanbul, Kulter, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2011). Several of Gomez Tonda’s works were featured in Réplica 21 and Origina. His work is included in numerous private collections.

Gerardo Gomez TondaEmail: contact@gerardogomeztonda.work

Website: https://gerardogomeztonda.work/Videos: https://vimeo.com/ggomeztonda